The clone moved through the shadows of the industrial outskirts like a ghost haunting a graveyard of steel. Abomination finally skidded to a halt in the center of an abandoned smelting plant, his bony chest heaving like a bellows as the adrenaline of his "victory" began to cool into a throbbing ache. The air here was thick with the scent of wet rust, stagnant oil, and the lingering heat of the day's furnaces.
That was when Aryan allowed the veil to thin.
The visible spectrum around his form began to warp. Light bending unevenly, refracting through the Absolute Stealth field. It was a localized distortion of the refractive index, making his outline waver like a heat mirage stitched together by digital interference. To Abomination's eyes, a human shaped blur simply manifested from the void, a glitch in the fabric of the night.
"Who the hell are you?" Abomination growled, his voice a serrated rasp that sounded like grinding gears. He shifted his weight, his massive claws furrowing the concrete floor as he prepared to lunge.
Aryan's voice emerged from the distortion. "You will be joining the Injustice League."
Abomination let out a mocking laugh that rattled the corrugated metal walls of the plant. "You think you can order me? I just broke the Hulk. I am the apex now. I answer to no one."
There was a chilling pause, filled only by the hiss of steam from a broken pipe.
"No," Aryan replied evenly. "You didn't."
Abomination's eyes narrowed into slits of burning amber. "What did you say?"
"You believe you overwhelmed him through superior biomechanics," Aryan continued, stepping closer. The light shimmered around him, revealing the crisp lines of a suit beneath the distortion. "But the imbalance you sensed, the loss of his momentum, the sudden motor lag in his strikes, that wasn't a failure of his strength."
The distortion sharpened. "That was me."
"Liar!" Abomination roared. His predatory instincts were screaming that the air around this stranger was wrong.
"If I were lying," Aryan said, his voice a steady hum of certainty, "you would have already attempted to tear me apart. But you feel it, don't you? You didn't defeat the Hulk. You were merely the beneficiary of a controlled experiment."
Abomination's breathing slowed, a flicker of genuine unease crossing his grotesquely altered features. The triumph he had felt minutes ago was curdling into suspicion. "Join? And what do I get for being your lapdog?"
"Resources," Aryan answered. "And a pathway back to a stabilized baseline. A way back to being… normal."
The word hit the beast like a physical blow. Abomination froze, his massive frame locking up. "Normal?"
"You were altered by experimental serums you didn't fully understand," Aryan said, analyzing the creature's fluctuating bio readings. "Join me, and I will stabilize the mutagenic feedback. I will reverse the bone protrusions and the neural degradation. I can give you the choice to be human again, or something better."
Abomination stared at the shimmering blur, rage battling a suppressed hope. "You're saying you can fix the mess the military made?"
"I wouldn't be here if I couldn't."
The response from the beast was immediate. Years of military training and monstrous instinct coalesced into an explosive lunge. He moved to crush the arrogant man, to silence the voice that offered hope wrapped in condescension.
But the moment his movement committed, the laws of biology failed him.
Every augmented system relies on the same foundation. electrochemical communication. Action potentials. Ion gradients. Carefully timed electrical impulses that dictate the contraction of muscle fibers. Aryan simply rewrote the local electromagnetic environment.
Using his Omega Level Magnetism, Aryan flattened the bioelectric activity in Abomination's nervous system into white noise. The signals telling his heart to pump and his muscles to fire lost all coherence. Blood flow disrupted by a magnetic flux that starved the brain of its rhythm.
Abomination's body rose a few inches off the ground, suspended by an invisible force. He was conscious, his eyes wide with terror, but he was trapped inside a frame that refused to obey him. He was a prisoner in his own flesh.
Aryan stepped closer, the light bending around his hand as he adjusted the field. "You're strong, Emil. But you're still a system. And systems obey rules."
Abomination tried to roar, but his vocal cords were locked in a magnetic vice. No sound emerged but the dry hiss of air escaping his lungs.
"You are alive because I allow it," Aryan continued, his voice devoid of heat. "And because your specific mutagenic profile still holds utility."
Time seemed to dilate. Seconds stretched into agonizing minutes as Abomination felt his very atoms being held in place. Finally, the pressure eased just enough for a voice to scrape out of his throat.
"…What… do you want?"
Aryan's answer was a final command. "Don't resist."
Before Abomination could process the words, the space around him just collapsed.
The world twisted into impossible geometries. Light fractured into warped bands, folding over itself in angles that defied Euclidean logic. Depth perception vanished. The smell of oil and rust was replaced by a vacuum like silence.
They stood within a pocket dimension tethered to the Fog Dimension, a localized fold in the space time continuum where Aryan acted as the ultimate arbiter of physical and biological constants. Here, the laws of thermodynamics were merely suggestions.
Abomination thrashed, but his movements were sluggish and uncoordinated. He was blind because Aryan was actively suppressing his primary visual cortex. By interfering with the electrical signals in the lateral geniculate nucleus, Aryan prevented the beast's brain from resolving raw retinal data into spatial imagery. To Blonsky, the universe had simply ceased to exist.
"Calm down," Aryan said.
[PURCHASE CONFIRMED: Nutrient Reversion Matrix]
[COST: $1,000,000]
The matrix manifested, a hyper dense suspension of billions of tailored bioactive nanites and synthetic enzymes held in a state of perfect quantum equilibrium. Aryan gestured, and the matrix flooded Abomination's suspended form, moving via quantum tunneling directly into the interstitial fluid, bypassing the rugged dermal layers entirely.
The science of Abomination was a nightmare of runaway cellular hypertrophy. His Gamma irradiated cells were trapped in a permanent metabolic "firestorm," where the mTOR pathway was jammed in the 'on' position. His body was overproducing Myostatin inhibiting proteins and calcifying bone at a rate that should have shattered his skeleton.
Aryan began the correction with surgical precision.
He targeted the aberrant gene loops. Using the matrix as a molecular scalpel, he suppressed the over expression of the GH/IGF 1 axis, the hormone cascade responsible for his monstrous size.
The matrix rebalanced the mitochondrial membrane potential. By introducing uncoupling proteins, Aryan bled off the excess ATP production that fueled the beast's supernatural strength, turning that raw energy into harmless thermal dissipation.
He forcibly reset the adrenal glands. Cortisol, norepinephrine, and growth hormones were plummeted back into human physiological thresholds.
The physical transition was agonizing. Muscle fibers began a process of rapid autophagic recycling, breaking down excess protein mass at a sub cellular level. The protruding bone spurs softened as osteoclasts moved with unnatural speed, reabsorbing the calcium into a human standard skeletal frame. The beast's skin rippled and shrank, the scales dissolving into fluid that evaporated in the fog.
Abomination let out one final scream as his nervous system underwent a synaptic recalibration. The massive electrical surges that had defined his monstrous persona were settling into the rhythmic firing patterns of a human brain.
Minutes later, the monster was gone.
Emil Blonsky lay shivering on the floor of the dimension, naked and curled into a fetal position. He gasped for air that finally felt thin enough to breathe, his human eyes blinking open in the grey mist, filled with a newfound clarity.